This is a collection of tools and products I use in our web businesses. See also my SEO and WordPress recommendations.
Ecommerce
- Interspire Shopping Cart – The shopping cart I have settled on for our big sites after trying numerous hosted and self-hosted offerings.
- WP-Ecommerce – a handy plugin for WordPress that provides medium level shopping cart functionality. I’ve used it on some smaller sites, but wouldn’t recommend it for large stores. Has a free and a paid version, so a good start if you want something cheap (Update: new site at GetShopped).
- Other WordPress ecommerce options include ShopperPress and Shopp.
Community Building
- vBulletin – the premier Bulletin board (forum) software on the market.
- vBSEO – provides SEO friendly URLs in your vBulletin forum. Becoming redundant after the recent upgrade of vBulletin to V4, but still worth considering for some of its extra features.
- aMember Pro – software for building membership sites. I put off buying this product for over a year because it looked so clunky and ugly, but having implemented it on our main site and it powering a significant part of our business, I haven’t looked back
- Wishlist Member – another membership site product, this one a plugin for WordPress. Very useful, and growing in popularity. But not quite as powerful as aMember.
Internet Marketing
- Interspire Email Marketer – the software I use to do all our email marketing, auto-responders and list management.
- iDevAffiliate – the affiliate management product I use for managing our partners on our business sites.
- Teaching Sells – excellent membership program, covering all facets of building a membership site